I just finished playing Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. I bought it after a strong recommendation from a few freinds on Google Buzz. I’d played the demo, and didn’t really like it. But when it went on sale on Amazon for $20, I grabbed a copy, figuring that I could sell it on EBay when I was done for at least $20. I’m not sure that I’m going to be selling it now.

Maybe it was my low expectations, but I enjoyed the game more than I’d even expected to. It certainly had its issues, but in general the game got better the more I played it. Once I got acclamated to the combat, it was certainly a lot of fun. I’m not trying to say that this game has no enjoyable gameplay. The controls are definitely a bit wonky – more than once I’d get stuck trying to jump from place to place because I needed to slide a quarter inch more up or down, and the camera angle often become difficult during some fights. Once, during a puzzle, I managed to somehow screw things up to the point that I don’t think I could have solved it without reloading. But this game’s most redeeming feature is not the flawed platforming.

I’ve heard it said that the story is what makes Enslaved a good game, but I’d like to disagree. The story is good, but what makes Enslaved a good game for me are its characters. Monkey is good. Trip is better. Pigsy is damn amazing. And the depth of these characters doesn’t really begin to come out until you’ve been playing the game for a while. That’s why I think the game gets better the more you play. When you begin, the characters are all strangers, both to you and to each other. As they grow to know each other, you as a player get to know them as well. And they must have used some advanced performance capture technology, because the performances of the CG characters during cutscenes are far too nuanced for a programmer to have coded. The humor and quality of acting in one cutscene at the start of chapter 13 made me think more of a scene with Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fischer than of a typical video game cutscene. Yeah – it was that good.

Bottom line? Try Enslaved. It’s a great game.